You must outsource your data telecommunication needs unless you are going to get all of the agreements in place then lay your own fiber. All carriers outsource services, including technical support. Carriers buy capacity from other carriers when they don’t have the resources. Outsourcing no matter what you relabeled it to is outsourcing.

The Internet giants don’t keep all of their support calls within the US. If I call the colossal big boys of the internet I could be in the Philippines, Argentina Australia, Brazil, Chile China or India. If I get India I hang up and try again. I find that outsourced Indian support is one of the least expensive, so not much is spent on training. I have actually called with a DS3 issue and was asked what operating system I was running. They spend more time on process then support.

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In a nut shell vendors must balance user satisfaction with desire to curb costs.

I found a few interesting statements.
“…At companies with revenues of at least $5 billion, as many as one quarter of IT jobs will be moved offshore by 2010.”ComputerWorldMay 2009

“You may not have signed a contract with your third-party IT services provider solely to cut costs. Maybe you were seeking specific skills or farming out non-core work to focus on strategic initiatives, or looking for a back door into an emerging economy.”CIO
June 2009
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I have heard this statement more times than I care to even count. Let’s face it as business owner you have to weigh quality of service and up time with cost. If internet is just something passive that you occasionally use to go to a web site, then the absolute cheapest internet connectivity is your solution. Usually this is the local phone company’s DSL service for $20.

If receiving email and accessing resources on the internet are as important as your telephone or your fax machine, then you need at least a T1. Higher speeds can be accomplished by bonding T1’s together or requesting higher capacity services. Any company with more than a half dozen phone lines or has DID numbers generally use a PRI (Digital Phone line). This Digital Phone line uses a T1 with some additional signaling to deliver dial tone to your PBX. My point is, if a T1 is the quality you need to run your phones, you should run a service equal on the data side. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to my first tech blog. This one will not be so technical but I plan on rummaging around the industry I live in to see if I can help out the people trying to find their way as it applies to services offered in the industry. I warn you there will be an opinion given but I find that helps as opposed to leaving topics vague instead of drawing a conclusion.

Let’s first understand the industry I am in. I get asked regularly what we do. It is a difficult answer because the answer is often misunderstood. The benefit of what we do is often lost because of the hype of the Dot Com Boom. Examples of this are as follows.

“No one was ever fired for using AT&T”
“No one was ever fired for using IBM”

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